Enthusiasms and expostulations, by Glenn Kenny

March 08, 2012

Geoff Dyer's "Zona"

J. Hoberman ended his excellent and largely admiring review of Geoff Dyer's new book, a lengthy, discursive, highly personal exploration/exegesis of and or "riff" on Andrei Tarkovsky's 1978 film Stalker with a backhanded compliment that's all but unimprovable, as such things go. "Zona is extremely clever — and that’s one thing Tarkovsky never was." Upon finishing the book itself, it occured to me that Hoberman was being slightly unfair there, but unfair in a way that Dyer kind of invites. I enjoyed the book to a degree that surprised me, maybe in part because I was prepared for it. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen Stalker, but I imagine it has to be at least as many times as Dyer has, and under as varied a set of circumstances. Hence, while his descriptions/evocations of certain scenes made me eager to revisit those scenes, never did I feel the actual need to put down the book and pop in the (problematic available) DVD of the movie to get my bearings.

And Dyer's got some things to say about the movie. The offhand style of his prose voice notwithstanding, he's done some heavy lifting, thinking-wise, on both Tarkovsky the artist and this particular work. Dig this: "One of Tarkovsky's strengths as an artist is the amount of space he leaves for doubt. In Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog looks into the eyes of the bears caught on film by Timothy Treadwell and decides the chief characteristic of the universe—or 'the jungley' as he metonymically termed it in Burden of Dreams—is 'overwhelming indifference.' For Tarkovsky the artist, despite his Russian Orthodox Christian faith, despite his insistence that the epic scenery of Utah and Arizona could only have been created by god, it is an almost infinite capacity to generate doubt and uncertainty (and, extrapolating from there, wonder). This, it hardly needs saying, is a far more nuanced position than Herzog's. The story of Porcupine, Tarkovsky said later, may have been a 'legend' or myth, and spectators 'should doubt...the existence of the forbidden Zone.' So to give oneself entirely to the Zone, to trust in it as Stalker does, is not only to risk but embrace betrayal by the principle from which he draws his life. That's why his face is a ferment of emotions: everything he believes in is threatening to turn to ashes, the ledge he clings to is poised to crumble beneath the weight of his need for it, the weight that also supports it."

That's my favorite passage in the book, I think, and it encapsulates what Dyer is capable of: his formidable intellect seems fully and unselfconsciously engaged with what is, at least in part, a philosophical work of art, and he's getting some stuff out of it. In other sections of the book his other masks serve him less well, and there's an example of what brings him up short in the above passage. While I don't really have any kind of personal objection to Dyer's never capitalizing the word "god," this insistence can't help but come off as a bit of an affectation and just the sort of thing that would go down a storm when he's a guest at one of those mythical Park Slope literary dinner parties that the folks who dream about them always complain about. Dyer's made an admirable career in part out of his insistence on fluidity viz his identification, self and otherwise, as a writer. And of course as a working film reviewer who wants to be, spiritually and practically, an actual film critic, this stance is going to abrade me somewhat. By "stance" I specifially mean a "them" (film critics writing about Stalker) versus "me" (disinterested polymath Geoff Dyer writing about Stalker) hierarchy, although to his credit Dyer only applies it implicitly. (It is perhaps no accident that the only English-language film critic he cites in the book is David Thomson, who is similarly albeit more explicitly imperial.) But the multiplicity of masks this fluidity affords him doesn't always rescue him from glib disingenuousness. As salutary as the average cinephile may find Dyer's admiration for Stalker, other aspects of his taste apparently stubbornly remain other aspects of his taste, as they say. And when he deigns to dismiss "the witless Coen brothers" or allows that, on revisiting, both The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie AND Belle de Jour "sucked," he comes off like the know-somethingish head of a homicidally hip ad agency trying to get a rise out of a nerdy junior exec.

Other times his cleverness serves him much better. Addressing the mystery of the Zone's mysterious Room (no relation to Wisseau's, I hope I don't need to say), which reputedly grants whoever enters it his or her greatest desire, Dyer asks "is one's deepest desire always the same as one's deepest regret?" "If so," he continues, "then my greatest regret is, without doubt, one I share with the vast majority of middle-aged, heterosexual men: that I've never had a three-way, never had sex with two women at once?" At this point I was, I admit, seized by a desire to throw the book across the room, and then Dyer keeps pushing: "Is that pathetic or is it wisdom?" and in a little while I thought, "Oh, okay, I see what you did." Whether Dyer is being honest or "honest" or not, he's playing purposefully with a theme of the film, which has to do with the venality of human desire, or the unaspirational nature of our aspirations. Which he doesn't tell of but shows, in some slightly mortifying family reminiscences that would be poignant if Dyer didn't relate them with such coolness.

It's the coolness, finally, that is not off-putting or even confounding but a little...I don't know the word. Dispiriting? Stalker is a work of art of an unstinting and unawkward earnestness; its daunting complexity notwithstanding, it's also painfully sincere. Dyer's voice doesn't convey so much a distrust of sincerity as an evasion of it, and one isn't sure during the passages wherein he makes himself look rather silly, as the bits in which he bemoans the loss of a beloved Freitag bag made of recycled tarps and seatbelts, as to where the effect he's going for breaks off from, you know, actual silliness. (My advice to him here is: you're a year older than me, pal. Forget the Freitag thing and next time you're in Paris go to the A.G. Spalding store on Rue Bourg Tebourg and pick yourself up a nice leather murse, you can totally afford it.) "Stalker has long been synonymous both with cinema's claims to high art and a test of the viewer's ability to appreciate it as such. Anyone sharing Cate Blanchett's enthusiasm—'every single frame of the film is burned into my retina'—attests not only to Tarkovsky's lofty purity of purpose but to their own capacity to survive at the challenging peaks of human achievement." As a fellow lover of Stalker, I don't find Blanchett's enthusiasm in the least bit fulsomely stated; Stalker is in a sense an INVASIVE work of art, and for all the ambiguity it contains it's also suffused with a proud Russian Orthodox defiance; it's not, "this is my truth, now you tell me yours," it's "this IS true." As for Dyer though, well, can't yousense his discomfort in the above passage? I really wonder just what the hell he's afraid of. Like, if he truly gets off the pot and yells I LOVE THIS, the kids at Slate are gonna like him less? Who knows? Of course, the very act of writing this book itself can be seen as getting off the pot and yelling I LOVE THIS, but...upon reading the book entire, one can actually be less convinced of this somehow. Weird.

This Saturday at the Tishman Auditorium in Manhattan, Dyer will head a fascinating panel (Walter Murch, Philip Lopate, Francine Prose, Michael Benson, and, sigh, one of the kids from Slate, Dana Stevens) for "Tarkovsky Interruptus," where Stalker will be screened in installments, which the assembled will discuss interstitially. An interesting idea. I will attend and report; details on the event are here.

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Glenn, have you read "The Missing of the Somme"? It's the last thing of Dyer's I've read (I'll get to "Zona" sometime soon). It seems to have some thematic echoes, being not so much about the thing (World War I here) but about how the thing is observed. Of course, there's a bit of a gulf scope-wise between a world war and a film although one of the main thrusts of "Somme" is that the memorization of the War (in England) has almost turned the entire thing into a movie, narrativized, compacted, deconstructable.

Detachment from his subjects is a running theme, at least in what I've read, and given that the subject is often himself I can see where the dispiriting coolness comes in. I happen to like it and found it tilting closer to poignancy (not getting there, though) in "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi." If he's evading sincerity it's because the reflex has been shot by all the cleverness, and he knows it. It's a voice that might belong to a much younger half brother of Richard Tull from "The Information," where the self-pity (or loathing) is still slinking around in the background, coloring the jokes, and hasn't been yanked to the fore just yet.

Or whatever. I just tend to enjoy his stuff a good deal. I'm not fluent enough in Lawrence to give "But Beautiful" a try. Listening to someone as interested in the art of watching things talking with Walter Murch ought to be priceless. Looking forward to hearing about it.

Hunh! Okay, maybe I do need to check this out. STALKER is, about half the time, my favorite movie ever (the other half it's THE MIRROR), and I was way excited to hear about a full book on the subject coming out... until I heard about the three-way bit, which I thought was perhaps true but also stupid. But you're now making me think it's worth the looking, especially since Dyer's three-way might not be so different from Porcupine's bag of money.

Don't know if even the possibility of seeing Walter Murch can induce me to see Tarkovsky interruptus, though...

Joe, Ruscico, the license-holder that I believe is responsible for all the versions of "Stalker" on DVD, put a non-Tarkovsky-supervised 5.1 surround sound track on their master, and it's the default soundtrack the movie will start off in unless you go into the intro menu and pick the mono soundtrack that Tarkovsky and his sound artists so meticulously engineered and mixed. Not an entirely disastrous state of affairs, but not an ideal one. (Hope they don't accidentally lead off with the surround soundtrack when they screen it for the event on Saturday, Mr. Murch may go ballistic.) There are other issues with the thing, none so awful as to ruin a home theater experience on good equipment. Nevertheless, if there was ever a film that warranted an extravagantly faithful Criterion transition to disc, "Stalker" is it.

Thanks for the great consideration of a book I'm still struggling with a little bit. Regarding Dyer and Thomson, it's worth noting that "A Biographical Dictionary of Film" was the only book Dyer submitted for Sight and Sound's "Best Film Books" poll a while back: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/polls/film_books_full.php#dyer

Pete: I read Out of Sheer Rage (I think But Beautiful is his jazz book) before I read more than one or two Lawrence novels, maybe a handful of short stories. No need to have a Lawrence background, mainly because he purposefully does not talk too much about Lawrence. It reads more like someone who started out wanting to write a book about Lawrence, discovered Thomas Bernhard, and realized the utter stupidity of trying to write about any one thing at a time.

Glenn: Was it Thomson who criticized Tarkovsky as lacking humor? The unease that you sense in Dyer might be coming from a similar place, the equation of seriousness of purpose with self-seriousness. It isn't an equation I find convincing, at least not for Tarkovsky.

Dyer is the Rich Little of contemporary post-modern literature. Out of Sheer Rage was his Bernhard impression, and Zona is his Foster Wallace impression. He's does a passable job with both, but he only reminds me what the writers he is aping would have done with the same material, or what they already had done with their material, which Dyer cherry picks with a snotty sense of entitlement. He's a good writer and a smart guy and all that. So what.

Chris: Even though I'm a fan, that's a pretty accurate characterization. However, everyone these days is imitating Bernhard (see anything praised by James Wood in the New Yorker), and Dyer did it with more lightness and wit than the dozens of youngish Americans trying to sound like dour middle-aged Austrians. But ZONA is an intriguingly weird pairing of author and subject. As an admittedly shallow man, lazy and hedonistic, Dyer doesn't seem like he would ever watch STALKER, let alone write a book about it.

Much more grating than a lower-case "god" is the very idea of an "almost infinite capacity to generate doubt and uncertainty." At what point does one become sure and certain in such a universe? Why balk at "infinite"? A tedious, precious, entirely unnecessary qualification. Commit, man!

@Joel: Good catch (and "Out of Sheer Rage" is such an awesome title; stupid to mix it up). But thanks for the go ahead of sorts. I'll definitely pick it up in time. I'm not sure about the impersonation tag. "Jeff in Venice" is willfully Mann but I have a hard time placing "Missing of the Somme" or "Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It."

Yeah, the 'inability to commit' to the point of not being able to sit and watch the whole thing nonstop. I have not seen 'Stalker' except at home via VHS many years ago, but among other things is its suspense that never is relieved. To break it up into pieces and attempt to explain it as you go along is to destroy what it is. Its about faith, about the unknown and to attempt to 'understand' or 'explain' it as it is shown is to treat it with contempt.

While Ted has a point, I must confess I'm quite bummed I'm not in the city this weekend - this sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I truly look forward to Glenn's recap. Anyway, at the same time I will be across the country watching Barry Lyndon on the big screen. Maybe we can stop it every 1/2 hour to analyze if it's 1.66 or 1.78? ;)

This live discussion/interrupted watching thing reminds me of the time I spent three weeks in high school watching BEING THERE with Russ "Paul is Dead" Gibb: we'd watch the film for a few minutes, then he'd spend the rest of the period telling us everything that we "missed". And while, yes, Being There is packed with allusions, a lot of it was "he's leaving the car, the car is blue, blue is the color of the sky, that's heaven, now he's leaving heaven, and descending into hell"-- as Chance _ascends_ the stairs to the mansion. (Interestingly, he had no explanation for the scene with the rug.)

That experience put me off of any kind of interrupted cinema for a long time-- I often won't even pause a movie at home to use the restroom-- though with Lapote and Murch in attendance, this certainly sounds more worthwhile.

Thanks for this, Glenn. That event also sounds like fun. Wish I could go.

I'm generally a pretty big fan of Geoff Dyer. I think he's a literary chameleon with a genuinely offbeat sensibility. I haven't read "Zona" yet, but I'm planning to. It's interesting that people are making comparisons with David Foster Wallace. Dyer, as we know, is no big fan of Foster Wallace, but it wouldn't surprise me. Since his death, DFW has probably become the single most influential essayist since Joan Didion. From Zadie Smith's recent essay collection to John Jeremiah Sullivan's "Pulphead", the Wallacian imprint is everywhere.

Another recent book-length essay about a film is "Noriko Smiling", by the excellent British novelist and critic Adam Mars-Jones, which takes on Ozu's "Late Spring". It's worth checking out if you can track down a copy.

Are they going to interrupt THE MIRROR too? Not that I don't think this kind of close-viewing wouldn't be illuminating. Not that I believe the special unbroken flow of a Tarkovsky masterpiece casts a spell that should not be put on pause. Just that I'm not sure I could learn anything personally from this kind of endeavor because the films are too deeply personal for me. I don't want to vivisect them this way.

The first time I saw STALKER was late one night on a shitty VHS tape and it was still so good that it immediately became for me the greatest film I'd ever seen -- and it remains so to this day. For years after that I was afraid to watch it, even on film, because I didn't want to ruin the impact and mystery of my initial encounter. When I finally did see it again at the American Cinematheque it was even better than I remembered. Since then I tend to watch STALKER at least once a year or so.

That passage above about a three-way or whatever makes me think of Ceylan's DISTANCE, but not in a good way. The protagonist in that film treated STALKER like his cultural veggies and switched to porn when Tarkovsky bored him. As if the only two choices any thoughtful young fellow had in life were the greatest art film ever made and spanking it. It's like the godless aesthete version of the Madonna/whore thing that plagues Catholic filmmakers. Dyer's book isn't full of too many more tedious juxtapositions like that I hope.